What should a liberal arts education provide?

So my broad understanding is that there are two important components to education.  On the one hand, education is vocational: that is you learn skills relevant to a profession.  On the other hand, education is liberal: that is you learn skills relevant to life as a free person.  It seems to me that we've lost sight of the second goal, that the current liberal education is a historical artifact that has lost its most useful characteristics and kept its outdated ones, and that our educational institutions owe it to us to have a rethink along the lines I describe.

Wikipedia has some historical background on this that seems relevant to my rant.  For those of you who hate clicking links or fear Wikipedia, the liberal education (the education for free people, as opposed to for slaves), was basically verbal reasoning enshrined in the Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and (eventually, once we got to the middle ages) mathematical reasoning enshrined in the Quadrivium of Geometry, Mathematics, Music, and Astronomy.  It's worth mentioning that the Quadrivium is probably better understood as Statics, Number Theory, Ratios, and Mechanics, but they used useful proxies for the names instead.  Whatever.  It seems that between the Trivium and the Quadrivium we have basically all the tools necessary to explore the depth and breadth of human achievement.  That makes sense, since that's basically the point of having a liberal arts education - to give you the tools to understand and contribute to discourse in the free world.

Now, it seems to me that while the tools described in the Quadrivium enjoy broad support and advocacy in education, they are the least useful, and indeed increasingly antiquated, tools.  The Trivium, by contrast, seems to be all the more vital today as in the past, and is given considerably less attention.  We basically fail to explore these ideas in depth or with formal rigor at any point in the liberal education - saving perhaps brief flirtations in philosophy, theology, or literature.

The modern world is increasingly (to its great credit) a quantitative one, but those quantities are large and their relationships complex and stochastic, wherein the past what numbers we encountered were limited in scope and mechanically related.  To engage with these new kinds of numeric data, one needs a strong understanding of probability and statistics.  To reason at all, one needs Logic.  To speak precisely (a precondition for any useful debate) one needs Grammar.  To speak well, one needs Rhetoric.  Perhaps, along with Statistics, we should consider something like Aesthetics: a discipline dedicated to effectively and convincing displaying things (in this case quantitative data).

It seems very much to be the case that learning how to recognize and generate well reasoned arguments--precise in language, and effective in style--and to support or analyze such arguments with ready knowledge of the proper treatment and presentation of statistical/numerical data is a key skill to avoid being deceived and to defend one's beliefs in the modern world.  How is it that our institutions of liberal education have so uniformly failed to acknowledge these needs and address them?

And just one more thing (still contraceptives)

The key question about whether Catholics are harmed by the contraceptive mandate is whether they are being asked to do something immoral.  I don't think they are.  The key questions about whether religious freedom is harmed by the contraceptive mandate are:
1. Is the mandate objectionable to some on the grounds of faith?
2. Is there a legitimate federal interest in overriding these objections (as in prohibitions on human sacrifice or (perhaps less legitimately) polygamy)?

It's clear that the answer to 1 is yes, but it's not clear that the answer to 2 is no.  The federal government heavily subsidizes employer provided healthcare, so one might reasonably think that if you take the subsidies you have to take the strings that come with them.  Furthermore, it seems possible that there's a legitimate federal interest in reducing healthcare costs, and perhaps even a right to reproductive freedom to be protected.  More below the fold.

Clarifications on contraception

The contraceptive arguments in the comments have been sort of muddied by terminology, and I think it's worth clearing some of it up in a new post.

Whose religious freedom is most validly conceived as being at risk?
The employer's.  If this impinged on the conscience of the employees, then Catholics would be obliged not to work for secular employers providing the objectionable coverage.  I have never heard anyone make that claim for the entirely natural reason that it is a crazy claim.  Furthermore, the mandate is upon employers, not employees.  It seems clear that that is the natural scope of the argument.

What sort of harm might be done to the employer?
Let's enumerate the ways in which the employer certainly will not be harmed (any of these harms would clearly be a severe violation of religious freedom):

1. They will not be obligated to purchase contraceptives. (They are obligated to provide employees with compensation usable for the purchase of contraceptives, which is not the same thing.)
2. They will not be obligated to provide contraceptives.
3. They will not be obligated to use contraceptives. (for completeness sake. It's hard to imagine a Catholic institution with a systematic need to use contraceptives professionally)

Here is a sort of harm that would not be introduced by the mandate, but might conceivably be an existing harm:

1. The funds of a Catholic institution might be used by a third party to purchase an objectionable service (true before and after the changes thanks to the broad utility of money and the inability of non-church Catholic institutions to to fire people for sinning)

I addressed the above in my last post and in the comments.  But since then I've had some conversations that brought up additional concerns.  Here are some conditions under which others have convinced me there might be potential for new harm:

1. The Catholic institution might be forced to enter into a contract for an objectionable service 
2. The Catholic institution might compensate a sinning employee more than his otherwise identical but non-sinning counterpart. This would be objectionable from both a direct standpoint, and also from the standpoint of systematically encouraging sinful acts.

I don't think either of these harms occur, but I do think it's worth considering the conditions that prevent these harms from occurring.

The first important clarification that needs to be made is the nature of the relationship between the employer, the health insurance, and the employee.  The employer provides the employee with a compensation package.  This compensation package includes direct monetary compensation, but also includes a variety of other things like access to a company car or other equipment, travel budgets, journal subscriptions, and health insurance.  Health insurance is a contract between an insurance company and the insured, in which the insured purchase access to a wide variety of services at the amortized cost of the likelihood of all service use over time over all people insured by the company.  The employer serves two important roles in this kind of compensation: as a negotiator, and as a source of funds.  The employer is in a much better negotiation position than an individual is, so it can get better prices, and it can make sure that the policy stays up to date by paying the cost of the service directly to the insurer instead of giving it to the employee as money and hoping that the employee remembers to pay the insurer.  

The point of all this is that the insurance company doesn't provide the employer with any services at all. The contract is between the insurer and the insured (quite explicitly, you have to sign a form and everything, it's your name on the policy &c).  This means that potential harm 1, about the Catholic institution being required to enter into a contract for objectionable services, is avoided. 

Potential harm 2 is a little trickier in this context, because it rests on some subtle distinctions.  The important one is the distinction between an item's value and cost.  The cost of the employer providing health insurance is the same for two equivalently risky people (and maybe for all people if the employer is a good enough negotiator).  That is the compensation provided by the employer.  The value of that compensation is subjective with respect to the employee.  A perfectly healthy employee might receive literally zero value from the employer health-insurance compensation, but that employee was none-the-less identically compensated.  A diabetic, a habitual drunk, a cancer patient, a recreational boxer or part-time thug might derive greater value from their health insurance compensation than the perfectly healthy employee, but they are likewise identically compensated.  If the value of compensation is the moral issue then Catholic employers already systematically over-compensated the habitually violent over the peaceful and healthy.  But it seems wrongheaded to claim that that's the case, so I think that we can safely put potential harm 2 aside.  The compensation of all employees remains the same, regardless of sinning status, but the value of the compensation varies systematically with respect to the sinfulness of the employee.  This is already the case (consider sexually transmitted diseases for instance) and so no new harm is done.  The already existing harm of the institution providing more value to more sinful employees seems to me to be of the same kind as the other pre-existing harm, and could only be remedied by the same mechanism (allowing Catholic institutions to fire people for sinning).

Incidentally, as I've mentioned before in comments, I think this whole issue is moot because the purchase of contraceptives is not in and of itself sinful.  The only sinful thing about contraceptives is using them to prevent pregnancy, an act for which culpability cannot be transferred.  More fundamentally, I don't think that it's possible to sin without doing something sinful.  Religious institutions are obligated to avoid doing sinful things, and to condemn sinful actions, and so long as they are allowed to do so no freedom is violated.

Injecting principled Reasoning into the Contraceptive Mandate Shouting Match

Recently, there has been a bunch of noise about Catholic Institutions being required to provide deductible-free access to contraceptives in the health insurance plans they provide their employees.  Angry diatribes and weirdly neutral negative opinion pieces have been written on the subject.  They are angry (or bizarrely bland), so it's understandable that they don't clearly understand what they're talking about.  Let me clear things up for everyone involved (that means you Catholic Bishops).

See the difference? Me neither.

The objections in this debate are essentially of the form "We object to you forcing us to recognize that the people we employ use the money we give them to buy contraceptives."  That is dumb.


Kinds of thing that would infringe on religious freedom:

1. Requiring Catholic hospitals to provide abortions
2. Requiring Catholic doctors to prescribe the pill
3. Requiring Catholic pharmacies (do these exist?) to sell the pill or condoms or what-have-you.

Kinds of thing that would NOT infringe on religious freedom:

1. Requiring that health insurance benefits provided by Catholic institutions include deductible-free access to contraceptives
2. Requiring that Catholic institutions pay their full-time employees (Note: 2 is equivalent to 1)

Reasoning in word form below the fold:

SOTU 2012

They did a state of the union sort of thing. I found it much more enjoyable than the last one.  The substance can basically be summed up as:

"We have done awesome in the foreign policy sphere.  We inherited a spectacularly bad economy, we have turned things around, and we have a plan for how to consolidate and build on these economic gains.  Also, Republicans are making it really hard to get things done around here, despite how many of our policies are from their playbook. Go America!"

The speech is book-ended by the administrations substantial foreign policy successes, but the meat of it is all economic.  First, Obama lays out the short and long term factors involved in our economic woes (long term: structural adjustments such as outsourcing and replacement of workers with robots, short term: irresponsible lending/borrowing and the subsequent banking collapse).  He sees the outcome of all that to be increased inequality and high unemployment.  He then walks through the story of the catastrophic economic collapse (pre-Obama policies), and the subsequent recovery (under Obama policies).  He highlights the auto-bailout in particular, which is in my mind the clearest example of successful stimulative action.  Finally, he highlights some ideas about how to consolidate and build upon these recent gains.  They basically boil down to restoring regulations whose loss enabled the collapse, implementing recent regulations to eliminate the need for future bank bailouts (Dodd-Frank), implementing a tax code with fewer deductions for multinational corporations and very rich individuals (Buffet rule), increasing exports by forcing other countries to adopt policies favoring the U.S., funding entrepreneurs and basic research, reforming education, and investing in infrastructure and energy (both gaseous and green).  

Along the way we see some brief comments about immigration reform, some useful facts that belie the right wing "Obama is a socialist" dialog, and one unfortunate spilled milk joke.  Point by point below the fold (masochists only).

Why does the religious right hate the social safety net?

Okay, so here are the arguments I hear most often:

1. Wealth redistribution is "unjust"
2. Welfare, unemployment insurance, medicaid and other programs that help the needy introduce "moral hazard"
3. Charity shouldn't be "forced"

Right, now, I'm a Catholic and I don't have a whole lot of access to protestant theology but I hear they use a Bible that, while not exactly the same, bears a marked resemblance to mine.  Let's look at these arguments by the numbers.

Why we (Catholics) cant have nice things...

As a practicing Catholic I feel like it's my duty to point out when someone in the church says stuff that seems crazy and stupid.  Here's the latest example.

Basically, head exorcist says yoga is satanic and harry potter is the path to evil. I get that this guy basically worries about Satan's encroachments on a professional basis, so he's likely to be a little paranoid, but this is deadly crazy. 

First of all, if yoga were to lead to any religion at all (doubtful) it would lead to Hinduism, which is decidedly different from Satanism (as the Church clearly recognizes).

Secondly, and not to put too fine a point on it, the Harry Potter thing is totally crazy, and the argument about it is self contradictory. Exorcist man says that Harry Potter is bad because it might encourage people to seek out Satan to get magical powers, but he also says that Satan is all about keeping people from acknowledging his existence. Somehow HP does both, but that seems tricky since how you gonna ask daddy-devil for the accio when you ain't not believe he's there.

I'm sure this guys faith is sincere and all, but he really shouldn't be allowed to give interviews.